cracked culture?

first published by a virtual biennale, line magazine
www.avirtualbiennale.tumblr.com

Cracked Culture? / The Quest for Identity in Contemporary Chinese Art

Artists: Ma Liang, Ma Han, Shi Jindian, Jiao Xingtao, Han Zijian, Wang Xiaosong, Wang Chengyun, Resi Girardello, Ying Tianqi, Feng Feng, He Gong, Liu Guofu, Huang Gang, Ferruccio Gard

Curators: Wang Lin, Gloria Vallese

Venue: Liceo Artistico Statale di Venezia, Palazzo Giustinian Recanti & Convento dello Spirito Santo

Cracked Culture? The Quest for Identity in Contemporary Chinese Art attempts to confront ideas about cultural and personal identity, nationality and tradition and the Western and Eastern world.  According to the curator, Wang Lin, contemporary Chinese artists are intensely conflicted between East and West, and tradition and modernity. Often, their artistic efforts reflect the choices of Western curators and investors, rather than their own authentic creativity. This exhibition claims to ‘look from a different perspective.’ In confrontation with typically Venetian locations, thirteen Chinese and two Italian artists attempt to reveal the genuine face of their contemporary art environments.

The exhibition is a combination of ‘traditional’ Chinese style, post-modern painting, ethereal film installations and gilded anatomical sculptures, with a persistent undercurrent of morbidity. The concentration upon death, disorder and disintegration is not necessarily consciously conceived in all the works, yet Gao Yang’s gaudy paintings hint at human irrationality in life, and fragmentation in death, while Wang Chengyun’s painterly representation of historic events are imbued with power and violence. 

Unfortunately, the exhibition feels confused, and the insistence on an authentic Eastern viewpoint becomes more of an obfuscation than a clarification. Despite the consistent permeation of melancholy throughout the works, they remain diverse in subject matter, materials, technique, attitude and presentation. The works are interesting in their variety, with certain stand out pieces such as Ying Tianqi’s Traces of the Vicissitudes and Shi Jindian’s White Forest. Furthermore, the curation of works at the Convento del Santo Spirito is extremely interesting, incorporating elements of the university building rather than attempting to overrule them. In particular, a video projected onto heaped chairs creates absorbing and amusing parallels between the importance of art and education. Occasionally there are arrows pointing to seemingly empty classrooms, forcing the viewer to search for artworks that may or may not exist.

However, while certain artists, such as Ólafur Ólafsson and Libia Castro, use the Venice Biennale in order to highlight the fiction of a ‘national identity’ within contemporary art, this exhibition is still naïvely presenting it as a reality. Ólafsson and Castro, who represent Iceland at the Biennale this year, presented three new iterations of their ongoing projectYour Country Doesn’t Exist, which explores political, socio-economic and personal forces that affect present day life. The work is an interpretation of the complex relationships which compose various cultures, calling attention to the difficulties in establishing a monoculture within any given society or country.

It seems redundant to press the point of an ‘artistic national identity’, when one doesn’t appear to be present, but Cracked Culture eagerly presses it. The Venice Biennale is an international, contemporary art festival, thus, arguably, inciting artists to represent their country; to create work which demonstrates its unique character. However, artists at the 2011 Biennale seem to have moved on, creating a diverse discourse which challenges this simplistic idea, leaving Cracked Culture trailing behind on its quest for identity.

Kathryn Lloyd